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Assembling a Micro-scale Biochemistry Lab Like Snapping LEGOs Together
An anonymous reader writes: Microfluidic systems promise to bring the same level of precision and control seen in the electronics industry to chemistry and the life sciences. Typically, devices are fabricated at substantial cost and using borrowed techniques from the semiconductor industry. Researchers at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering have invented a system of discrete microfluidic elements akin to those found in electronic board design. It was inspired by the ease with which LEGO bricks are assembled into a larger structure, and finally allows for the rapid prototyping of "Lab-on-Chip" devices. The original paper is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
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Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I'm waiting for Lego-On-Chip
I foresee something like this being a boon to terrorists who would love to make chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction. I suppose it's just a matter of time.
When I was a kid my parents had a collection of very old Britannica supplements from the 1960s. Some sort of yearly book for each year after the main books came out.
Anyways, when I was a kid I was always impressed by the pictures and the descriptions. One of the articles was about fluidics, the pictures of plates of metal with holes, piled up and bolted together and doing logic operations with boiling liquids and what not.
I'm just wool gathering, but it seems like the 1960s were unusually fertile in all fields and it's fun to see one of these "anything goes"-type technologies still being useful after so long.
Mostly random stuff.
... is already a long-running micro biochemistry experiment..
In B4 the Legos doesn't have a plural. Last time I said Legos on this site I got flamed hard!
As if Slashdot readers don't already have enough experience with "micro-fluidic structures" (nudge, nudge, wink, wink!).
"Make this drug on a chip" is kind of awesome, but the next step is the "FPGA" equivilent where novel compounds can be downloaded to it and have it assemble them from base compounds up. What might be implausible industrially due to having too many steps becomes plausible on the very small scale. From here we have the ability to have standard chemical inputs generate any given chemical output and we're on the way to 3D printers that can print almost anything. Thinking futuristically here, but thats your first step to a genuine star trek replicator without having to resort to imaginary quantum woo
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Lego is the building material as a whole, therefore it's already a collective noun. So there's no such thing as "a lego", it's "a lego brick", and by extension there's no such thing as Legos.
'nuff said.
I ran into this cool video, could these two techniques be mixed somehow?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WiRbu6uk_9A
I am not an engineer, so it's hard to tell what is happening here, but it looks/sounds like an electronic coating of some kind makes the fluid move without a pump.
It's more like bolting meccanoes together.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
As a chemistry hobbyist, I always wanted one of those big organic-labware sets with pluggable components -- you could build a multi-stage vacuum still, controlled-atmosphere reactor and separator, whatever you wanted -- but true micro- or nano-scale chemistry never seemed as appealing.
By analogy, I always thought playing with discrete components or small-scale logic chips was a lot more engaging than wiring up a microcontroller and loading it with canned or slightly-modified firmware.
On the other hand, you can unquestionably get a lot more done with the canned-complex-parts approach. I'll be fascinated to see where this leads.